ABSTRACT
With the sequencing of the human genome and the availability
of high-power computational methods and a variety of high-
throughput “-omics” technologies (e.g., genomics, transcriptomics,
and metabolomics), biomedical research and clinical care are
poised to undergo revolutionary change. These new technologies
and approaches have fueled the rise of systems biology, which
is now fully established as a discipline. The new and emerging
field of systems medicine, an application of systems biology
approaches to biomedical problems in the clinical setting, leverages
complex computational tools and high-dimensional data to derive
personalized assessments of disease risk. Systems medicine offers
the potential for more effective individualized diagnosis, prognosis,
and treatment options. Achieving this goal requires the effective
use of petabytes of data, which necessitates the development of
both new types of tools and a new type of physician-one with a
grasp of modern computational sciences, -omics technologies, and
a systems approach to the practice of medicine. As part of this
transformation, clinicians will need views of integrated biomedical
data from disparate sources and will begin to utilize validated in
silico methodologies for analysis. A critical factor in the success of
systems medicine will be the ease with which high-quality, high-
dimensional data can be integrated, redistributed, and analyzed
both within and across functional domains.
